1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information recording and reproducing apparatus for recording information on or reproducing information from an exchangeable recording medium such as a magneto-optic disk or a phase change optical disk, and more particularly, to an information recording and reproducing apparatus for copying information from an exchangeable master medium to a plurality of exchangeable media.
2. Description of the Related Art
Exchangeable and portable information recording media such as floppy disks are now widely used in information processing systems such as small-sized computers. Exchangeable optical recording media such as magneto-optical disks and phase change optical disks-are also used to record a great amount of information such as image data.
Exchangeable recording media of these types are useful to produce a plurality of duplications of an original (master) medium by copying the entire information from the master medium to other media, and thus this duplication technique is advantageously used to distribute or publish information.
In a recording and reproducing apparatus used together with magneto-optical disks or floppy disks, there have been proposed various types of exchangeable recording medium copying apparatus for copying information from a master medium to a plurality of other disks, thereby producing a plurality of disks having the same information at the same time.
For example, a conventional copying apparatus for magneto-optical disks generally includes: a disk drive unit for reproducing information from a master medium; a plurality of disk drive units for recording the information onto copying media; operation means such as a switch or the like by which the copying operation is stated; and a hard disk unit for temporarily storing the information recorded on the master medium.
In this type of copying apparatus for magneto-optical disks, a copying operation is started in response to an operation of a switch or the like performed by a user. In the copying operation, the apparatus temporarily transfers the entire information from a master medium to a hard disk, and then writes the information stored temporarily in the hard disk onto a plurality of media.
In some cases, however, starting a copying operation requires complicated switching operations. Furthermore, in the case of a copying apparatus for magneto-optical disks, it takes a long time to record information on a medium via a disk drive unit, which results in long waiting times in operations performed by a controller or in operations performed by other disk drive units. In the technique in which the entire information recorded on a master medium is stored temporarily on a hard disk before copying the information to other media, the efficiency of a copying operation is poor.
In a common information recording and reproducing apparatus having the capability of copying information from a master medium to a plurality of media, as described above, the entire information recorded on a master medium is transferred temporarily to buffer memory means such as a hard disk in response to a copying process starting command issued by a user, and then recorded on a plurality of coping media. This means that the user has to perform some operation via a switch or the like to start a copying process. However, the operation for starting a copying process is complicated in many cases.